Occasional random comments from a father of four.
"If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great." Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) in A League of their Own

23 January 2010

The middle class is filled with people who pay attention to the second page of their paycheck stubs.

It's clear that the middle class is the great enemy of collectivism. Only they have the combination of voting power, money, and economic self-interest to see the growth of government as undesirable, and provide effective resistance. They generally view their interactions with government in a negative light – they've all spent time in the Department of Motor Vehicles mausoleum, spent hours wrestling with tax forms, or been slapped with a traffic citation they don't think they deserved. They understand the inefficiency and emotional instability of government, and instinctively resent its intrusion into their lives. A health-care takeover is the best chance collectivists will ever have of persuading the middle class to vote itself into chains

The middle class is a vast group in a capitalist society, which is one of the things collectivists really hate about capitalism. Its upper reaches include the entrepreneurs and small business owners that bring economic vitality. Virtually every aspect of Obama's agenda is designed to injure or burden small businessmen, and this is no accident. Despite their angry rhetoric about giant corporations, leftists have little trouble controlling them.

it is crucial to understand that it doesn't matter if the people engineering a collectivist state have sinister motives or not. In fact, the belief that their intentions make a difference is incredibly dangerous. It's related to the catechism of the faculty-lounge Marxist, which holds that communism and fascism only failed because bad people were in charge of them.

and of the President's statement that he pushed so hard for the health care plan because insurance companies "were doing things that were just plain wrong, and were leaving folks in an extremely vulnerable position."

It doesn't matter if this is his sincere belief, spoken straight from the heart. His health-care plan was still an awful idea that united the country in opposition against the increasingly thuggish and arrogant methods he used to advance it. Those methods are integral to the collectivist enterprise. It will always become thuggish and arrogant, because when all virtue resides in the State, those who oppose the growth of the State become villains by definition.